The world’s largest bat colony spends its summers in BCI’s Bracken Cave in the Texas Hill Country near San Antonio. The bat mothers and pups of this maternity colony of Mexican free-tailed bats eat tons of insects every night, including many costly farm pests. From March to November, the bats’ nightly emergence from the cave takes more than three hours and includes so many bats that they show up on Doppler radar…

Enjoy this quiet moment of emergence as millions and millions of mother and baby bats swarm out into the evening sky:

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